How Could It Not?

How could a storm like this one, only a few miles from Manhattan, with enough wind and lightning to wake me up at 1:00 a.m., still not drop any rain on us?  I was sound asleep, but startled wide awake to howling wind and rattling screens.  Our bedroom was lit up by almost continuous lightning flashes. The entire line of storms was
coming straight at us, west to east, bearing down quickly.  Oh, Joy!

But I knew something was wrong.  There were no watches or warnings on the local TV channels; a bad omen because these days the weather people seem to panic at every drizzle. The lightning was abundant, but was what we oldtimers call "heat" lightning; flashes of lightning high in the atmosphere without any accompanying thunder to scare the children.  All this fury and force, probably creating rain that was evaporating before it could reach the ground.  Curses.

We've seen no rain from mid-June through August 9th, almost two entire months during our hottest time of year.  On the positive side, I hadn't mowed my yard since July 1st.  On the negative side, the roses are not very prolific right now and things are drying up before their time.  We did have a brief respite on the weekend of August 10th, with a total of 1.9 inches of rain over three days.  That momentarily filled in the cracks and resulted in me having to mow down the weeds in the grass on August 17th.  But we're already dry again and the next few days are forecast to hit the 100's.

Please be warned.  I promise you that the next time I see something like this on radar, day or night, I'm going to do everything possible to see that it rains.  I'll rush out to water the hopeless lawn, I'll spray the weeds with weedkiller, and I'll quickly have the car washed and then leave it out to be rained on.  Heck, if the clouds form nearby but I see them start to move, I'm going to run out naked and do a rain dance.  Surely it won't come to that, but desperate times call for drastic measures.  You might want to drive by my house with blinders on for a bit, just in case.

Here It Comes, Weather Ready or Not

I suppose, as you can see from the forecast for the next few days, that we are finally leaving winter behind here in Kansas.  Ninety-one degrees, that's 91°F(!) predicted for tomorrow.  It is a wonder to me, sometimes, that I can grow anything at all here in the Flint Hills as I look at the temperature fluctuations that my poor plants undergo.  Just for grins, I checked back over the past 43 odd days at the official weathersource.com data to the first of April to see how many days that the maximum temperature hit 70°F or above here.  In the past 43 days, there were 10 days at 70° or above, with five of those days very early in April, from April 5-9th.  On April 10th, the maximum temperature was 35°, a 38 degree difference in highs in 24 hours.  On the 13th and 14th, we were back to the 70's and then on April 18th, the high was 39° again.  On April 21st, there was a single day of 70°F, snow on April 23rd, and then on May 7th and 8th it was 76° and 77°, dropping back a little bit into the 60's before our current warm spell.   

 

So, out there somewhere in my garden, I've got a bunch of new little rose plants that have barely seen the 70° mark in weeks, that haven't had to develop much in the way of a root system, and now they've got to survive at least a solid week in the 80's and even 90's.  And, although the drought is easing here, there are a bunch of already-stressed mature plants who will be whipsawed further by the temperatures and wind.  I guess ProfessorRoush is going to be doing some watering, whether he likes it or not.

 

I'll remind my readers that on April 23rd, 20 short days ago, at 9:10 a.m., my garden looked like this:

 

And now the temperature is going to be 91°F tomorrow?  I'll put those temperature fluctuations up against any other spot in the country, maybe in the world.  It is no wonder that the commercial horticultural test plots in Kansas City are so popular;  as one K-State horticulturist is fond of saying, "the big nurseries know if it performs well here, it will perform well anywhere in the United States."  Listen up, all you mail-order nurseries, now you know why I want plants sent sooner than your Zone-conditioned schedules, in order to get new babies acclimated before the hot weather hits.  So don't give me any grief the next time I want band roses a month ahead of when you want to send them.  You know who you are.

I Lay Awake...

I laid awake all night and listened to the rain.  I listened as the dry raspy voice of the parched ground was stilled under a steady gentle shower.  I listened as the wind gently caressed the earth, drawing away the stored heat of the sun's furnace.  I listened as the lightning flashed and demanded in a deep, booming voice that the soil bring forth life again.  I listened as the world became right again.

This was the radar view as I settled in last night, the whole area of middle Kansas on the brink of a break in the drought.  The national media has focused here recently, noting that drought has struck the hardest in areas of Kansas and Iowa, calling it "extreme" or "exceptional" drought here in this band of Flint Hills that I've chosen to garden.  Yesterday's newspaper, as always, grimly listed the tally; 14.21 inches of rain so far in 2012, 11.51 inches less than normal.  I was afraid, seeing this radar picture, knowing that I'd seen it several times before in this summer, the promised storms breaking on the shores of the western Flint Hills and leaving us yet dry.  For an hour more I wondered, until the first gentle drops kissed the skylights, increasing in tempo until my anxiety eased at last.

My rain vigils are dependent both on modern technology and on ancient instincts.  I'm addicted to an Iphone app called MyRadar, which allows me to see the rainstorms coming at the touch of a button, direction and severity on full display.  I don't deal in rain chances.  Twenty percent or sixty percent predictions mean nothing in the mid-continent unless you actually see and feel the thunderheads build.  My inborn and farm-bred intuition of when the rain will wither or build, and where it will head and how far it will spread, are still far better than the muddled mathematical measures of local meteorologists.  I recently have come to suspect that authorities have conspired to change the reference colors on radar in the same way they manipulate the Homeland Security threat level.  Storms with orange and red pass over us with barely a dribble where in the past they meant deluges and discussions of cubits.  Forget green and blue, those colors now leave us frustrated and weary.  At the end of any actual rain that reaches the ground, I use simple gauges to tell me if we were teased or fulfilled, but my first knowledge of the volume bestowed is always from a small depression in the blacktop right off of my garage pad.  Filled to overflowing is more than 3/4th's of an inch.  Barely damp is less than a 10th.  My hopes and dreams are raised or dashed with my first morning sight of that puddle.

I laid awake all night and listened to the rain. The patter of the rain against the window near my left ear, and the rhythmic breathing and occasional snores of Mrs. ProfessorRoush in my right ear, calmed me and rested me far better than sleep.  The rain continues now as I rise, with chances for more rain in each of the next three days, God-willing.  But for now, the puddle overflows and I and the prairie earth are renewed.

Striking Serendipity

A second blessed event 0f RAIN (!) occurred Wednesday night.  Short-lived, but a nice little downpour of a little over an hour yielded 2.6 inches of rain.  We may even be wetting the subsoil now!

I had just recovered from a day of clinics, eaten supper, perused the paper, and watched the evening talkies, when I realized that a decent storm front had assembled and was about 20 miles northwest of Manhattan, bearing down on us.  I've been waiting weeks for this opportunity, and, seizing the moment, I quickly donned garden shoes and ran out to spread a bag of alfalfa pellets on as many roses as I could.  I always like to spread the pellets just before a rain so they'll "uncompress", mold a bit, and be a little less likely to draw rabbits and rodents to the base of my roses. 

Now this is what I call lucky!

 After emptying the alfalfa bag, I grabbed my camera and went out to take a few pictures of the developing storm front.  And then, by a "stroke" of luck, I snapped the photo of lightning shown above.  The camera was hand-held and looking straight west, past my neighbor's mirthful sign and over his pasture to the western ridge.  Gorgeous, isn't it? And better yet if you could see it in the non-compressed form.  I've hoped for years to snap such a picture and here it is, mostly focused, straight, and as good as I could hope for.  God, in action, right on the Kansas prairie.

The rock sign, in case you're wondering, is at the entrance to my neighbor's property a few hundred feet to the west of my house, and it carries a slightly altered quotation from "Paint Your Wagon", both the name of a 1951 musical and the 1969 motion picture (Lee Marvin, Clint Eastwood) inspired by it. The hit song of the musical and movie was They Call the Wind Maria, with "Maria" pronounced "Ma-rye-ah."  My neighbor, as you can guess, is a little bit of a character to love such a haunting song that he had a rock engraved with it.  I surmise that he didn't know the correct spelling of the song title, but then neither did Mariah Carey's parents, who, according to omniscient Wikipedia, named Ms. Carey after the song.

The actual lyrics are:

Away out here they got a name
For rain and wind and fire
The rain is Tess, the fire Joe,
And they call the wind Maria

This picture was taken looking due north from the front of my house, as the storm came in.

Praise Be

According to yesterday evening's Manhattan Mercury, a miserable daily rag which keeps the wailing gardener informed of each and every increment of annual water deprivation, we had received 8.37 inches of rain year-to-date, with a deficit for June of 2.67 inches and a deficit for 2012 of 6.67 inches.  Yes, that's correct, we have only received 55.6% of our normal rainfall in 2012, adding more pain to the drought from Fall of 2011.

We have been seemingly deserted by the rain deities.  Just last Sunday, I watched a cloud split and go north and south of us, leaving this area clear and dumping 4 inches of rain on areas only 1/2 hour away.  The storm must have known that I had sworn to dance naked on the driveway if it rained and thus, in its wisdom, spared my neighbors from such a blinding glimpse.


Last night, I made no such threat of joyful full-exposure, and, safe from that unsightly danger, a gorgeous front formed and commenced to downpour here at 11:00 p.m.  ProfessorRoush, of course, went promptly into the most restful, worry-free sleep in weeks amidst the lightening and thunder and rain pounding on the roof.  And woke up this morning to the beautiful sight of both rain  gauges (I keep one near the house and one near the vegetable garden), containing 2.2 inches of rain. Even the daylilies are happy, although the dewy specimen above will likely be a bit spotted as the day wears on.

The forecast still shows chances for rain of 50%, 30%, and 60% respectifully for the next few days and, not normally a greedy sort, I'd  be pleased to see similar rainfalls every day of the next week. Yes, surely, Praise Be.

bRRRR...

I realize this post will carry little weight with those New Englanders who get the predicted 8-16 inches of snow today (Buffalo'ers, you know who you are!), but this iPhone screenshot, taken at 6:00 a.m., will suffice to tell you how the weather fairs in Kansas today.  Luckily, no frost in my high nest above Manhattan, but there's a light frost down here in the bottoms, sufficient to stunt any tomatoes out there at this early date. 

For your daily dose of absurdity, notice the notation for the high on Wednesday; 91F....a swing of 59 degrees in two days.

Story of My Summer

Before anyone panics, NO, this is not a picture of a KSU-physics-department nuclear test cloud over the Jayhawk's football stadium in Lawrence.

But as a rather useful illustration of the frustration that is gardening in the Flint Hills,for all of those who don't live in Kansas, I give you the picture below, snapped on my way home from work on September 9th. 




























I had just gone north from the Vet School, took one look due west, and immediately grabbed my trusty "Jeep" camera, the Nikon CoolPix L22 cheapo that I keep in the glove compartment, and pulled over.  This random rain cloud, the first actual rain hitting the ground that I'd seen in over a month, is sitting just to the south of my house, which is just over the hill on the western horizon at approximately the right hand edge of the cloud.  By the time I'd gotten home 5 minutes later, the cloud had moved on, leaving a 500 foot or so wide sprinkle path over my neighbor's driveway and the pasture between us. 

It was another week before we finally got a decent rain, an all-night soaker that provided us a solid inch of rain to wet the topsoil down four inches or so.  It's an odd feeling to dig down into the dirt of my garden right now; moist soil for the first few inches, and then dry subsoil as far down as my shovel will reach.

Welcome to the Flint Hill's my friends...welcome to the Flint Hills, the most damnable excuse for a mid-Continental climate evident to gardening civilization.